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FRANCE: Arab Workers in
French Factories

On
the production lines and in the press-shops and
paint-shops of the big car factories around Paris, 95
per cent of the workforce are immigrants -- mostly from
North Africa. When asked why this should be so, the immigrant
workers’ leaders are, for once, in agreement. “Today’s
Frenchman is spoilt”, says Yassir,an official of
the CSL union. “He gets everything on a plate --
social security, paid leave, a library, a discothèque.
He can count on education helping him up the social ladder.
He won’t accept exploitation. He refuses to work
on the production line”.

For Dali Abdel-Razzak, one of the activists who broke
away from the communist-led union, the CGT, “The
immigrants do the worst-paid and most unpleasant work,
in the press-shops and on the production lines”.
Born in Ghazaouet (Algeria) in 1953, Abdel-Razzak came
to France in 1973. He brought his guitar and at first
played music in Arab coffee-shops. “I liked it”,
he says. “I made friends and decided to stay”.
In 1976 he got married and started to work in a car factory.

In
excellent French, he vividly describes the harsh and repititive
work to which immigrants have become accustomed. “In
the press-shop you take a piece of metal which can weigh
up to 13 pounds. You put it down, you press it, you take
it away - sometimes 500 or 550 times an hour. If you take
off your gloves to blow your nose, you can’t catch
up. You are allowed to go to the men’s room for
seven minutes every four hours. At lunchtime you have
36 minutes. If you take five minutes to wash your hands,
between seven and 10 minutes waiting in the queue, you
are left with 15-20 minutes for lunch”.

For doing the most unpleasant work, the immigrant is
also the worst paid. “One of my frriends who was
hired 20 years ago makes 4.700 francs ($530) a month”,
says Abdel-Razzak. “in fact, one often makes less
that that. Right now, due to technical stoppages, I earn
exactly 3.000 francs ($340) a month”.

Why did the immigrant workers for so long accept such
conditions? Their traditional passivity was one of the
reasons why French comapnies began hiring them in the
1960s. After strikes in the coal mines of northern France
in 1963, the management started to recruit Moroccan workers,
who were considered submissive. At the same time, the
Simca car factory in Poissy (near Paris) hired workers
from the Casablanca area.

“They
soon had problems with these workers”, says Abdallah
Frayggi, a CGT delegate at Poissy, “and so later
they hired Moroccan from rural areas, being careful to
select illiterate workers”.The recruiting agents
from the Citroen car factories hired workers mostly from
the Souss, in southern Morocco, where the Berber population
respects the traditional values of family, religion and
monarchy.

The French National Immigration Office also hired workers
from the Souss, the Rif ands the Figuig area. Transplanted
to a factory in the suburbs of Paris, the Moroccan worker
-- who had often paid the recruiting agent to get hired
-- started work on a production line under the watchful
eye of a foreman who told him he was on probation. “Naturally,
he worked hard”, says Dali Abdel-Razzak. “And
since very often, at the beginning, his papers were not
in order, he was quite easy to control. He accepted everything
without daring to protest”.

The immigrant workers quickly discovered there were many
reasons for joining “the CSL system” -- to
buy what Akka Ghazi, a leading CGT official, calls “the
peace-and-quiet card”. The CSL -- the Confédération
des Syndicats Libres (Confederation of Free Trade Unions)
-- claims to be an “independent” trade union.
“We try to take into account the economic needs
of the company”, says Max Leberre, CSL secretary-general
at the Talbot plant in Poissy, “while protecting
the interests of the workers”; In fact the CSL is
a management-inspired “union” which exists
to discipline the workforce by a mixture of threats and
promises.

“I had a residence card valid for only one year”,
recalls Abdallah Moubine, a Moroccan worker born 30 years
ago near Agadir. “At the end of the year, I needed
a company certificate to renew it. When I asked my workshop
boss for it, he told me, “You get your CSL card
-- if not, you can go”. When I told him it
was blackmail, he just said, “that’s your
problem”. So I joined the CSL. I got my certificate,
and I was even promoted”. Today Moubine is a CGT
delegate at a Citroen factory near Paris.

As far as housing was concerned, a worker who joined
the CSL got a flat in one or two months, while a CGT member
could wait a lifetime. Ait Salah, a CGT delegate at the
Citroen factory in Aulnay, north of Paris, waited eight
years before he got his flat. “I applied for it
in 1975”, he says, “and I got a flat -- a
very dirty one, incidentally -- only in 1983. And that
was thanks to our successful strike in 1982”.

Inside the factory, CSL members were made workshop technicians,
and their salary was doubled -- “though they could
not even adjust a machine”, says Abdallal Frayggi.
And for most of the time these”technicians”
did not have to work -- they only had to keep an eye on
their colleagues.

Virulently anti-communist, CSL officials continually
urged workers not to join a trade union -- especially
the CGT. “No politics here; we want to work. There
is only one union here -- against the strike. Don’t
speak to people who want to draw you into politics, especially
those CGT men”, CSL representatives would repeat
time and again.

For those who stepped out of line,the punishment was
harsh. Abdallah Frayggi is a veteran among Moroccan trade-union
activists. He has worked in Poissy since 1967. In 1972
he joined the CGT. At that time, he says, if an immigrant
worker was seen talking to a CGT activist he would be
dismissed.

“So for two years I remained underground”,
Frayggi recalls. “In 1974 they decided to sack 600
or 700 workers, so I took the decision to declare myself
as a delegate, so as not to be dismissed (trade union
delegates are protected by French mlaw). At that time
I was working on a production line, three or four feet
away from my nearest colleague. When I went public I was
isolated, alone in a room. The workers were forced not
to speak to me, not even to say hello. At the canteen
no one sat near me”.

Simultaneously the management set up a system of “mini-bosses”
-- interpreters, supervisors, who must regularly be given
a bottle of Ricard (a popular French drink), and, after
the summer holidays, gifts from the countryside. It was
not until 1983 that this system was exposed by Akka Ghazi
in a long television interview.

“You were not judged according to your work”,
says Abdel-Razzak. “The important thing was to have
good relations with these mini-bosses”. Otherwise,
you would pay for it. “Mohammed, work and shut up”
was the usual remark -- and if the worker complained he
couldn’t work any faster, the foreman would sometimes
shout, “If these Arabs go on ruling the place, we”ll
go bankrupt”.

On several occasions the Moroccan embassy in Paris has
used all its influence to prevent immigran workers from
joining strikes, and to prevent their politicisation.
“It is clear”, says Abdallah Frayggi, “that
when our level of political consciousness rises, we look
at Moroccan politics with different eyes”.

Sometimes the Moroccan embassy has not hesitated to interfere
directly. In 1974, says Abdallah Frayggi, the Moroccan
consul summoned the three or four Moroccan workers who
were standing as CGT candidates and told them, “you
are here to work, not to get involved in politics. You
will run into problems”.

In the same year, three Moroccan activists who had joined
the Socialist-led CFDT union were arrested after going
back to Morocco for a holiday, and spent several weeks
in jail. In 1976, Mohammed Chabounia, a CGT delegate at
Poissy connected with the Moroccan Communist Party (PPS),
was detained for 18 days by the Moroccan police, who interrogated
him about his views -- on the Western Sahara conflict.
And in the summer of 1982, Merzouk Mokhtar was arrested
and held for several days by the Moroccan police, who
questioned him about his activities as president of the
leftwing Association des Marocains en France (AMF).

But the embassy generally prefers to deal with the immigrants
indirectly, through the Amicale des Travailleurs et Commerçants
marocains en France (ATCMF), set up in 1973. Like the
CSL, the Amicale uses a mixture of threats and promises.
Through its links with the Chaabi Bank, it has helped
workers to transfer money to their families back home,
or to get a loan. It has also helped to buy land at discount
prices (though some of these ventures have gone bankrupt).

On the other hand, the Amicale has on occasion played
a direct role. During a strike at the Renault factory
in Flins its members went round the workshops -- without
any authorisation to do so -- urging the immigrant workers:
“Do not go on strike. It is against the interests
of your country. You will be jailed when you go home”.

In fact the game played by the Moroccan embassy can be
ambiguous. If it used all its influence to break strikes
while President Giscard d’Estaing was in power,
it changed its tune after the electoral triumph of François
Mitterrand in May 1981. According to Said Amadi, spokesman
for the Association des Travailleurs Marocains en France
(ATMF), “The embassy had a few scores to settle
with the Mitterrand government, which was considered a
privileged ally of Algeria”.

Why did this system suddenly break down in the early
1980s? All the evidence links the new attitude of the
immigrant workers -- their new self-confidence -- to the
victory of the French left in May 1981.

“Before then”, says Dali Abdel-Razzak, “we
were afraid of the Moroccan authorities. The arrival of
Mitterrand helped to break the system. Giscard, (King)
Hassan’s buddy, had left. We could say many things
we hadn’t dared to say before”. For Abdallah
Frayggi of the CGT, “The victory of the left did
not change working conditions, but it made possible June
1982 -- the first strike in this factory (the Talbot plant
at Poissy) since 1958”.

Akka Ghazi, the CGT leader at Citroen’s factory
in Aulnay, admits that the political change in the country
as a whole had a big impact in the factories. “Before
the delegate elections, when we decided to stand as candidates
on the CGT lists, we put ourselves under the protection
of the government. We went to the Ministry of Labour,
and they sent inspectors who saw people were being followed,
beaten, treated like slaves; that dirty words -- such
as bougnoules (wogs) -- were used for the Arabs. When
the right was in power, they did not send inspectors to
the factories”.

Akka Ghazi also feels that the wave of strikes sparked
off in April 1982 were “provoked by the behaviour
of the interpreters, the spies: these people did a lot
to break up the whole system. We had reached the stage
where the workers could not stand the ill-treatment any
longer. I had put up with it for years. Others had put
up with it for longer than I had. I reacted; other people
joined me; and we succeeded in launching the movement”...